JoAnn Hackos Workshop Series

DITA Boot Camp
Want to know why structured, topic-based authoring is the technical communication solution of the future? Been asking what DITA is really all about? Want to know if it's the right direction for your organization? Confused about how to get started? The JoAnn Hackos Workshop Series invites you to a weekwlong intensive DITA Boot Camp.

DITA: Getting Started
In this workshop, you learn that DITA is a standard for authoring topic-based technical information, that using DITA provides significant business advantages, and that you can get started immediately with the DITA Open Toolkit.

Developing a Content-Management Strategy
In this workshop, we'll examine the issues involved in creating documentation databases. We'll discuss the impact of single sourcing on department organization, project management, training, writing style, document control, editing, and translation. We'll review some of the tools available and look at both their strengths and their shortcomings.

Minimalism: Creating Manuals that People Will Use
Minimalism isn't only for simple products or targeted at beginners. A minimalist approach makes complex products easier to understand and gets critical information more directly into the hands of experts. People attending this workshop report they've reduced their documentation by 50 to 75 percent.

Managing Your Documentation Projects
If you can keep your projects under control in the midst of chaos, everyone will think you're a miracle worker. If you can bring a semblance of order into the chaos, you'll at least be a hero. This workshop gives you the tools to succeed.

Outsourcing and Offshoring Information Development: A Management Challenge
Learn to calculate the hidden costs of outsourcing, understand when outsourcing is or is not a good solution, and identify the processes needed to ensure the successful management of remote team members.

Practical Usability Testing
You will learn to perform a usability test of your product or documentation. You will work through a sample test, taking on the roles of subject, test monitor, or cameraperson. You will review the steps required in planning, conducting, and evaluating the results of a usability test and will prepare a partial test plan for your own product.

Quality Metrics (In-house workshop only)
Develop a plan to measure the quality of your information-development and training efforts. Start with measurements of customer satisfaction using the four-stage Kirkpatrick system. Then move your measurements in house by identifying critical parts of your process that enable measuring. Know what internal measurements relate to cost effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

Strategic Planning for Information Developers (In-house workshop only)
Strategic planning—the process of determining where you intend to be and how you're going to get there—is absolutely essential to the success of any organization. But our assessment of the information development community indicates that the majority of organizations, whether operating as stand-alone businesses or as internal functions within larger companies, do little or no strategic planning. One of the main reasons is that they don't know what strategic planning is, why it's important, or how to do it.

Structured Writing for Single Sourcing
To implement a single-sourcing strategy for information development and publishing, we strongly recommend that organizations structure the content they produce. Well-structured content leads to more opportunities for reuse across products, user communities, delivery media, and other dimensions. More reuse leads to a greater return on investment, as well as the ability to serve dynamic content to your information customers.

User and Task Analysis for Information Design
This workshop focuses on practical techniques to learn about your users, their goals, and their work, and create a model that will serve as a decision-making tool throughout the life-cycle of your project or product. You'll learn how to make the most of your user information resources, whether based on site visits and contacts, in-house subject matter experts, or even, when you must, on your own guesstimates. A guided sequence of exercises will step you through the process of modeling users and their tasks and deciding on the methods that are most appropriate to your situation. You'll also receive a workbook amply illustrated with good and bad examples.

XML for Writers
In XML for Writers, participants work through multiple exercises and demonstrations on Document Modeling, establishing a DTD tree structure of your information, creating a DTD, and using the DTD to mark up a document in XML tags. The instructor gives demonstrations of processing and rendering techniques for creating exciting deliverables. Demonstrations of authoring and process tools are also given. Much of this interactive workshop focuses around the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and the benefits of using a topic-based writing approach. This includes development of information types, content units, and the powers of a single sourcing and content reuse strategy. You will come away with an understanding of how all of these different pieces fit together and what many of the acronyms, such as XML, XSL, XSLT, XHTML, XPath, and DITA, stand for.

For more information on workshops offered by Comtech Services, please visit the web site at www.comtech-serv.com/workshops.